Marine Gods Paying Homage to Love, c.1636–1638

The print

Printed by theprintspace, the East London fine-art lab trusted by artists, galleries and museums. Each print is made to order on Hahnemühle Photo Rag, a heavyweight 308gsm paper made from 100% cotton, with a soft matte surface and a natural white tone, using archival pigment inks made to last for generations.

Photo Rag suits this painting especially well. Its smooth cotton surface adds no texture of its own, so the craquelure of the nearly four-hundred-year-old canvas and Le Sueur’s soft, chalky sky come through exactly as they are.

Sizes available:

59×42cm, 23×17″, fine art print, open edition
84×59cm, 33×23″, fine art print, open edition
100×70cm, 39×28″, fine art print, open edition

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The story

Eustache Le Sueur (1616–1655) trained in the Paris studio of Simon Vouet, the most fashionable painter in France, and in 1648 was among the founding members of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. He died at thirty-eight.

This canvas is one of eight he painted from the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a dream-romance first printed in Venice in 1499, in which Poliphilo wanders a fantastical antique world in search of his beloved Polia. Here the pair are ferried to Cythera, the island of love, while the gods of the sea pay homage. The eight paintings were models for tapestries to be woven at the Gobelins workshops in Paris, but the tapestries were never made. It now belongs to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles; even our largest print is smaller than the real canvas.